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Monday, 10 April 2017

Enaction as a core connective concept: is non-reducible naturalism the way into consensus?

Brian D. Cohen "Strata" watercolor on paper

“Naturalism” is the doctrine that all can be explained via
science – in contrast to anti-realism, among other prevailing philosophies of
mind. However, the term “naturalism” has a long history of shifting meanings,
and may or may not be a useful term for the current argument. According to the
SEP, “the term 'naturalism' has no very precise
meaning in contemporary philosophy.” (Papineu, 2016)

Historically, the term was employed by John
Dewey, Ernest Nagel, Sidney Hook and Roy Wood Sellars, who sought to connect
philosophic discourse to what was emerging as so-called “hard science” in the mid
1900s. As the disciplines of physics, biology, sociology, and psychology came
to use more sophisticated “scientific methods”, these thinkers urged that human
experience be situated within the natural world rather than outside it. Believing
that “reality is exhausted by nature, contain[s] nothing “supernatural”, and
that the scientific method should be used to investigate all areas of reality” (Papineu,
2016), the self-identified followers of Naturalism were, essentially,
Naturalists in the old-fashioned meaning of the term. That is, those individuals
who knew the names of biotia, understood weather patterns, and knew their granite
from their basalt. There was a long tradition of “gentleman and lady”
naturalists, those who were stamp collectors of butterflies, beetles, and
pressed flowers; who sought solace in the hyper-organizing stratagem of cataloging
the world via Linnaeus’ taxonomy. Also, Naturalists who were writers, such as Henry
David Thoreau in New England, and John Muir in the western US, were
instrumental in politicizing the landscape in order to drive the public towards
conservation.

Which brings me to the curious assertion from DeJeagher and
Di Paolo (2007) that the current hot topic in cognitive science to explain cognition
is enaction.

“Rather than being a set of all
radically novel ideas, the enactive approach is better construed

as a synthesis of some new but
also some old themes. Overall, the enactive perspective is a

kind of non-reductive
naturalism. It sees the properties of living and cognitive systems as

part of a continuum and
consequently advocates a scientific program that explores several

phases along this dimension.” (p.3)

I have traced the idea of Naturalism above (and admitted
that there does not seem to be a consensus among philosophers as to its current
usage), now for the term “reduction.” Reduction is the idea that facts (or
entities) needed to make “true” a certain proposition about an area of
discourse can be superseded – or are preceded
– by other facts, and therefore the principle topic is reduced (simplified or
explained only by) other facts or entities e.g.: biology goes to chemistry goes
to physics.

So, a non-reductive
naturalism is a construct that links science and the natural world in meaning,
while being a whole in itself – De Jeagher and Di Paolo use the term paradigm.
Enaction is descried with five core ideas that are mutually
supported (as in non-reducible) autonomy, sense-making, embodiment,
emergence, and experience. The
authors introduce enaction in this sense, in order to “…sketch an
enactive account of social understanding that takes the properties of the
interaction process as its point of departure.” (p1) The paper continues with
cogent and coherent arguments to support the basic notion that organisms (and
here they insist that issues for non-human life are equally as relevant as for human
life) exist within social dimensions, and it would behoove the new cognitive
science to embrace such a framework as progress continues for understanding
cognition.

Em-bedded in the world and time;
em-bodied throughout the organisms’ soma—that is, not exclusive to the brain;
emergent through processes of interaction; experienced phenomenologically:
En-active cognition is the connecting paradigm which may set out a way for
disparate disciplines, perspectives and philosophies to engage with the
troubling question, the ultimate human quest for understanding of our own
cognition. Will it work?

References:

De Jaegher, H and Di Paolo, E. (2007). Participatory Sense-Making: An Enactive
Approach to Social Cognition. Phenomenology and the Cognitive
Sciences, 2007.